Scottish author (1918?2006)
Dame
Muriel Spark
|
---|
Spark in 1960
|
Born
| Muriel Sarah Camberg
(
1918-02-01
)
1 February 1918
Edinburgh
, Scotland
|
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Died
| 13 April 2006
(2006-04-13)
(aged 88)
Florence
, Tuscany, Italy
|
---|
Resting place
| Cemetery of Sant'Andrea Apostolo,
Civitella in Val di Chiana
|
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Occupation
| - Novelist
- short story writer
- poet
- essayist
|
---|
Language
| English
|
---|
Alma mater
| Heriot-Watt College
|
---|
Notable works
| |
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Spouse
|
Sidney Oswald Spark
(
m.
1937;
sep.
1940)
|
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Children
| Samuel Robin
|
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Dame Muriel Sarah Spark
DBE
FRSE
FRSL
(
nee
Camberg
; 1 February 1918 ? 13 April 2006)
[1]
was a
Scottish novelist
, short story writer, poet and essayist.
Life
[
edit
]
Muriel Camberg was born in the
Bruntsfield
area of
Edinburgh
, the daughter of Bernard Camberg, an engineer, and Sarah Elizabeth Maud (nee Uezzell).
[2]
[3]
Her father was Jewish, born in Edinburgh of Lithuanian immigrant parents, and her English mother had been raised Anglican. She was educated at
James Gillespie's School for Girls
(1923?35), where she received some education in the Presbyterian faith.
In 1934?35 she took a course in "commercial correspondence and precis writing" at
Heriot-Watt College
. She taught English for a brief time and then worked as a secretary in a department store.
In 1937 she became engaged to Sidney Oswald Spark, 13 years her senior, whom she had met in Edinburgh. In August of that year, she followed him to
Southern Rhodesia
(now
Zimbabwe
), and they were married on 3 September 1937 in
Salisbury
.
[5]
Their son
Samuel Robin
was born in July 1938. Within months she discovered that her husband was
manic depressive
and prone to violent outbursts. In 1940 Muriel left Sidney and temporarily placed Robin in a convent school, as children were not permitted to travel during the war. Spark returned to Britain in early 1944, taking residence at the Helena Club in London.
[6]
She worked in
intelligence
for the remainder of
World War II
. She provided money at regular intervals to support her son. Spark maintained it was her intention for her family to set up a home in England, but Robin returned to Britain with his father later to be brought up by his maternal grandparents in Scotland.
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
[11]
Between 1955 and 1965 she lived in a
bedsit
at 13 Baldwin Crescent,
Camberwell
, south-east London.
[12]
After living in New York City for some years, she moved to Rome, where she met artist and sculptor Penelope Jardine in 1968. In the early 1970s, they settled in
Tuscany
, in the village of Oliveto, near to
Civitella in Val di Chiana
, of which in 2005 Spark was made an honorary citizen. She was the subject of frequent rumours of lesbian relationships
[13]
from her time in New York onwards, although Spark and her friends denied their validity. She left her entire estate to Jardine, taking measures to ensure that her son received nothing.
[13]
Spark died in 2006 and is buried in the cemetery of Sant'Andrea Apostolo in Oliveto.
[14]
Literary career
[
edit
]
Spark began writing seriously, under her married name, after
World War II
, beginning with poetry and
literary criticism
. In 1947 she became editor of the
Poetry Review
. This position made Spark one of the few female editors of the time.
[15]
Spark left the
Poetry Review
in 1948.
[15]
In 1953 Muriel Spark was baptized in the
Church of England
but in 1954 she decided to join the
Roman Catholic Church
, which she considered crucial in her development toward becoming a novelist.
[1]
She was formally instructed by Dom Ambrose Agius, a Benedictine monk of Ealing Priory, whom she had known from her Poetry Society days, and was received into the Roman Catholic Church on 1st May 1954 by Dom Ambrose.
Penelope Fitzgerald
, a fellow novelist and contemporary of Spark, wrote that Spark "had pointed out that it wasn't until she became a Roman Catholic ... that she was able to see human existence as a whole, as a novelist needs to do".
[16]
In an interview with
John Tusa
on
BBC Radio 4
, she said of her conversion and its effect on her writing that she "was just a little worried, tentative. Would it be right, would it not be right? Can I write a novel about that ? would it be foolish, wouldn't it be? And somehow with my religion ? whether one has anything to do with the other, I don't know ? but it does seem so, that I just gained confidence."
Graham Greene
,
Gabriel Fielding
and
Evelyn Waugh
supported her in her decision.
Her first novel,
The Comforters
, was published to great critical acclaim in 1957. It featured several references to Catholicism and conversion to Catholicism, although its main theme revolved around a young woman who becomes aware that she is a character in a novel.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
(1961)
[a]
was even more successful. Spark displayed originality of subject and tone, making extensive use of
flashforwards
and imagined conversations. It is clear that
James Gillespie's High School
was the model for the Marcia Blaine School in the novel.
[17]
[18]
Her residence at the Helena Club was the inspiration for the fictional May of Teck Club in
The Girls of Slender Means
published in 1963.
[6]
Archive and biography
[
edit
]
In the 1940s Spark began to keep a record of her professional and personal activities that developed into a comprehensive personal archive containing diaries, accounts and cheque books and tens of thousands of letters. Spark used her archive to write her autobiography, "Curriculum Vitae", and after its publication in 1992 much of the material was deposited at
National Library of Scotland
.
[19]
Spark refused permission for the publication of a biography of her by Martin Stannard. Penelope Jardine holds publication approval rights, and the book was posthumously published in July 2009. On 27 July 2009 Stannard was interviewed on
Front Row
, the
BBC Radio 4
arts programme. According to
A. S. Byatt
, "she [Jardine] was very upset by the book and had to spend a lot of time going through it, line by line, to try to make it a little bit fairer".
[20]
Honours and acclaim
[
edit
]
Spark received the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize
in 1965 for
The Mandelbaum Gate
, the Ingersoll Foundation T. S. Eliot Award for Creative Writing in 1992 and the
David Cohen Prize
in 1997. She became an
Officer of the Order of the British Empire
in 1967 and
Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire
in 1993 for services to literature. She was twice shortlisted for the
Booker Prize
, in 1969 for
The Public Image
and in 1981 for
Loitering with Intent
.
[21]
In 1998, she was awarded the
Golden PEN Award
by
English PEN
for a "Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature".
[22]
Spark received eight
honorary doctorates
including Doctor of the University degree (Honoris causa) from her alma mater,
Heriot-Watt University
in 1995;
[23]
a Doctor of Humane Letters (Honoris causa) from the
American University of Paris
in 2005; and Honorary Doctor of Letters degrees from the Universities of
Aberdeen
,
Edinburgh
,
London
,
Oxford
,
St Andrews
and
Strathclyde
.
[24]
In 2008,
The Times
ranked Spark as No. 8 in its list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
[25]
In 2010, Spark was posthumously shortlisted for the
Lost Man Booker Prize
of 1970 for
The Driver's Seat
.
Relationship with her son
[
edit
]
Spark and her son
Samuel Robin Spark
at times had a strained relationship. They had a falling out when Robin's Orthodox
Judaism
prompted him to petition for his late great-grandmother to be recognised as Jewish. (Spark's maternal grandparents, Adelaide Hyams and Tom Uezzell, had married in a church. Tom was Anglican. Adelaide's father was Jewish, but her mother was not; Adelaide referred to herself as a "Jewish Gentile.") Spark reacted by accusing him of seeking publicity to advance his career as an artist.
[26]
Muriel's brother Philip, who himself had become actively Jewish, agreed with her version of the family's history. During one of her last book signings in Edinburgh, she told a journalist who asked if she would see her son again: "I think I know how best to avoid him by now."
[27]
[28]
[29]
Bibliography
[
edit
]
Novels
[
edit
]
Short story collections
[
edit
]
- The Go-Away Bird and Other Stories
(1958)
- Voices at Play
(short stories and plays, 1961)
- Collected Stories I
(1967)
- Bang-bang You're Dead
(1982)
- Open to the Public: New and Collected Stories
(1996)
- Complete Short Stories
(2001)
- Ghost Stories
(2003) ? previously collected tales
- The Snobs
(2005) ? previously collected tales
Poetry
[
edit
]
- The Fanfarlo and Other Verse
(1952)
- Collected Poems I
(1967)
- Going Up to Sotheby's and Other Poems
(1982)
- All the Poems
(2004)
Other works
[
edit
]
- Tribute to Wordsworth
(edited with
Derek Stanford
, 1950)
- Child of Light
(a study of
Mary Shelley
) (1951)
- Selected Poems of Emily Bronte
(1952)
- John Masefield
(biography, 1953)
- Emily Bronte: Her Life and Work
(with Derek Stanford; 1953)
- My Best Mary
(a selection of letters of
Mary Shelley
, edited with Derek Stanford, 1953)
- The Bronte letters
(1954)
- Letters of John Henry Newman
(edited with Derek Stanford, 1957)
- Doctors of Philosophy
(play, 1963)
- The Very Fine Clock
(children's book, illustrations by
Edward Gorey
, 1968)
- Mary Shelley
(complete revision of
Child of Light
, 1987)
- Curriculum Vitae
(autobiography, 1992)
- The French Window and the Small Telephone
(limited edition, 1993)
- The Informed Air: Essays
(2014)
Critical studies and reviews of Spark's work
[
edit
]
Notes
[
edit
]
- ^
The story was published in
The New Yorker
magazine in 1961, and was first published as a separate novel in 1962.
References
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
Jenny Turner (17 April 2006),
"Dame Muriel Spark"
,
The Guardian
,
archived
from the original on 14 May 2008
, retrieved
28 September
2007
.
- ^
"Our Records: Muriel Spark and Scottish births in 1918"
.
www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk
.
ScotlandsPeople
. 7 January 2019
. Retrieved
22 March
2022
.
- ^
"Muriel Spark, Novelist Who Wrote 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,' Dies at 88"
.
The New York Times
. 23 April 2010.
Archived
from the original on 23 July 2018
. Retrieved
11 February
2017
.
- ^
Spark, Muriel (1993).
Curriculum Vitae
. London: Penguin Books. pp. 116?7, 123?4.
- ^
a
b
Taylor, Benjamin (May 2010).
"Goodbye Very Much: The many lives of Muriel Spark"
.
Harper's
.
320
(1, 920). Harper's Foundation: 78?82.
Archived
from the original on 11 October 2012
. Retrieved
21 August
2011
.
(subscription required)
- ^
"Author Muriel Spark dies aged 88"
,
BBC News
, 15 April 2006,
archived
from the original on 23 April 2006
, retrieved
15 April
2006
.
- ^
"Obituary"
,
News
, BBC, 15 April 2006,
archived
from the original on 23 April 2006
, retrieved
15 April
2006
.
- ^
"Dame Muriel Spark, 1918?2006: The novelist of identity"
,
The Weekly Standard
, 1 May 2006,
archived
from the original on 6 August 2006
, retrieved
12 July
2006
.
- ^
"Spark of Genius"
(magazine)
,
Doublethink
(a consideration of the author's work), no. Winter, 2006,
archived
from the original on 9 July 2006
, retrieved
12 July
2006
.
- ^
"Muriel Spark"
. National Library of Scotland.
Archived
from the original on 28 May 2014
. Retrieved
15 March
2014
.
- ^
Mount, Ferdinand,
"The Go-Away Bird"
,
The Spectator
(review of
Muriel Spark, the Biography
by Martin Stannard), archived from
the original
on 18 June 2010
.
- ^
a
b
"Muriel Spark leaves millions to woman friend rather than son"
,
The Standard
, 14 April 2007,
archived
from the original on 7 December 2017
, retrieved
1 April
2018
.
- ^
"Addio Muriel Spark, romanziera ironica tra Scozia e Toscana"
.
Il Tempo
. 2006.
Archived
from the original on 29 December 2017
. Retrieved
29 December
2017
.
- ^
a
b
Sheridan, Susan (2009). "In the Driver's Seat: Muriel Spark's Editorship of the "Poetry Review"
".
Journal of Modern Literature
.
32
(2): 133?142.
doi
:
10.2979/JML.2008.32.2.133
.
JSTOR
25511808
.
S2CID
161544914
.
- ^
Hager, Hal (1999), "About Muriel Spark",
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
, New York: Harper Perennial, p. 141
.
- ^
"Childhood - Muriel Spark - National Library of Scotland"
.
digital.nls.uk
.
Archived
from the original on 4 February 2019
. Retrieved
3 February
2019
.
- ^
Taylor, Alan (2017).
Appointment in Arezzo : a friendship with Muriel Spark
. Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd.
ISBN
9780857903747
.
OCLC
1005842948
.
- ^
"Muriel Spark archive"
. National Library of Scotland.
Archived
from the original on 15 March 2014
. Retrieved
15 March
2014
.
- ^
"Companion shelves 'unfair' Spark biography"
,
The Telegraph
, 15 March 2016,
archived
from the original on 6 July 2020
, retrieved
6 July
2020
.
- ^
"Muriel Spark"
. The Man Booker Prizes. Archived from
the original
on 6 January 2009.
- ^
"Golden Pen Award"
(official Website).
English PEN
.
Archived
from the original on 21 November 2012
. Retrieved
3 December
2012
.
- ^
"Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh: Honorary Graduates"
.
www1.hw.ac.uk
.
Archived
from the original on 18 April 2016
. Retrieved
4 April
2016
.
- ^
Sleeman, Elizabeth (2002).
The International Who's Who of Women 2002
. London, England: Europa Publications. p. 540.
ISBN
978-1857431223
.
- ^
"The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"
,
The Times
, 5 January 2008,
archived
from the original on 25 April 2011
, retrieved
19 February
2010
.
- ^
"A far cry from Morningside"
,
The Scotsman
, 23 April 2006,
archived
from the original on 11 July 2012
, retrieved
8 April
2007
.
- ^
Readings
, Edinburgh: Book Festival, 2004, archived from
the original
on 28 September 2007
.
- ^
"Bard Mitzvah"
,
San Diego Reader
, 2 July 1998,
archived
from the original on 4 February 2014
, retrieved
20 July
2012
.
- ^
Millar, Anna; MacLeod, Murdo (14 May 2006),
"Spark's son: I won't cash in on mum"
,
The Scotsman
, Edinburgh, archived from
the original
on 30 April 2007
Works on Spark's writing
[
edit
]
Jardine, Penelope, ed. 2018.
A Good Comb
. New Directions.
External links
[
edit
]
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